Unchained - From the Oslo Freedom Forum: Blockchain vs. the Surveillance State - Ep.64

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

This recording is of Blockchain vs. the Surveillance State, a series of talks and a panel from the Oslo Freedom Forum put on by the Human Rights Foundation. In this session, hear presentations from Ryan Shea of decentralized technology platform Blockstack; Galia Benartzi of smart token platform Bancor; Steve Waterhouse of surveillance-free internet project Orchid; and Arthur Breitman from smart contract platform Tezos. Afterward, I moderate a panel among the four speakers that touches on the ways in which blockchains can be used to curb human rights abuses -- but also how bad actors can also use them for nefarious purposes. Oslo Freedom Forum: https://oslofreedomforum.com Human Rights Foundation: https://www.hrf.org The four presentations: Ryan Shea https://twitter.com/ryaneshea of Blockstack: https://blockstack.org (Also check out his interview with cofounder Muneeb Ali on Unchained: http://unchainedpodcast.co/blockstack-on-getting-independence-from-google-facebook-and-amazon) Galia Benartzi https://twitter.com/galiabenartzi of Bancor https://www.bancor.network/discover Steve Waterhouse https://twitter.com/deseventral of https://orchid.com Arthur Breitman https://twitter.com/arthurb of https://tezos.com Be sure also to listen to the Unconfirmed podcast episode with Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation -- not to be missed if you're interested in the topics discussed during Blockchain vs. the Surveillance State! http://unconfirmed.libsyn.com/alex-gladstein-of-the-human-rights-foundation-on-the-first-crypto-war-ep021 Thank you to our sponsors! Blockchain Warehouse: https://www.blockchainwarehouse.com Keepkey: https://www.keepkey.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Some of you may have heard on my other podcast, Unconfirmed, that last week I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum, put on by the Human Rights Foundation. I was incredibly humble to learn from and meet some of today's most courageous advocates for human rights from around the globe. I met defectors from North Korea, where some of my ancestors are from, as well as human rights defenders from Iran, Eritrea, China, Vietnam, and other oppressive regimes. I'm super excited to bring you the recording from the first day of the forum's tech lab, which opened with Blockchain v. The Surveillance Date, a series of presentations by four well-known crypto entrepreneurs in a panel discussion that I moderated. First, you'll hear from Ryan Shea of Decentralized Technology Platform Blockstack, who was a previous guest on Unchained, then from Goliab BenArtsi of Smart Token Platform Bankor, Steve Waterhouse of Surveillance Free Internet Project Orchid, and Arthur Brightman from Smart, contract platform TASOs. After that, we have a discussion about how blockchains can be used to fight surveillance, censorship, and privacy breaches by governments and corporations, or be used by them to surveil, censor, and invade your privacy. Blockchain versus the surveillance date was just the

opening event in a well-curated program, a lot of which touched on the potential in blockchain technology to combat human rights abuses. I encourage you to check out the videos which are posted on the Oslo Freedom Forum's Facebook page. Also, if you have not heard it yet, I strongly urge you to check out the Unconfirmed Podcasts featuring Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer for the Human Rights Foundation. He has some really fascinating insights into how blockchain technology can be used for good or for evil by governments. I'll link to it in the show notes. Without further ado, we'll start with a first presentation from Blockchain v. The Surveillance Date at the Oslo Freedom Forms Tech Lab by Blockstack co-founder Ryan Shea.

Blockchain Warehouse is an international blockchain accelerator, offering a wide range of token sale advisory services to promising blockchain-based ventures. With the leading advisor network, BCW is at the forefront of building landscape-changing blockchain companies and hosting successful token sales with more than $20 million raised so far. Today's episode is brought to you by KeepKee, the easy, safe, and simple way to protect your Bitcoin, Ether, Lightcoin, and many other data. digital assets. There's no time like the present to protect yourself from hackers, malware, and

viruses. Visit keepkey.com to order your secure hardware wallet today and use the code Unchained 10 for a limited time 10% discount. Hi everyone. So we all greatly value our freedom, but there are many threats today to the future freedom around the world. And I'm here to talk to you about the role that technology can play in promoting freedom and democracy and capitalism and many of the other pillars of a free society. I will focus on some of the most promising technologies today, in particular those that enable what's called decentralized applications. And I'll explain what those are, as well as dive into the types of applications that we can actually enable that can help us be more free. So a little bit about me. My name is Ryan Shea. I am the co-founder of a community

and platform called Blockstack for building decentralized applications. If you want to tweet about this presentation, mention me. You can find me on Twitter at Ryan E. Shea. So in Harry Potter, bear with me for a second. I'm about to make a point. in Harry Potter, there are three unforgivable curses. And so those three are avatacadabra, which results in death. There is Crucio, which is torture. And then there is imperio, which results in total control. And I want to introduce the concept that there is this same equivalent in the digital world.

There are three digital sins that form the basis of, some of the worst things that can happen in the digital world that can allow us to be victims in the physical world as well. And I would like to highlight these three as surveillance, censorship, and manipulation. So surveillance is the collection, analysis, and sharing of our information without our consent. Censorship is the controlling of the information that we can receive and disseminate. And then manipulation is the actual controlling of the types of information, the actual content that reaches us, often with the inclusion of false information that can cause us to change our behavior in ways that we won't even realize it. And so this is a really big

deal because these three digital sins can greatly influence the way that the world plays out. This can greatly influence democracy around the world, and we can take a look at a democracy map from 2017. It's very important, especially in the wake of the recent events of the last couple of decades. We saw the Arab Spring, which was enabled in part by social media, and so many other changes of the landscape around the world, it's so important that we get the digital world right. This is the way that we communicate throughout the world. This is the way that we congregate. This is the way that we work together. This is a very strong binding force of humanity. But with the right software, we can do a few very important things. We can limit mass surveillance,

we can combat censorship, and we can prevent and protect ourselves from manipulation. I'm going to go into exactly what decentralized applications are, but note that with decentralized applications, there are three very important things to take away. One is that you own your data. Your data is stored with you, it's backed up in your own private personal cloud, it is encrypted with keys on your device, end-to-end encrypted between devices. Two, there is no central operator that can be coerced. It is a decentralized network. You can think of something like email or BitTorrent or Bitcoin, no one operates that there's no single door to knock on like with Facebook or Google. And the third thing is that you have choice between the different versions

of your software. Just like with email, you can choose between Gmail, Outlook, and many other pieces of software. With Bitcoin, you can choose your Bitcoin wallet. With BitTorrent, you can choose the client that you want to use to download files. With centralized applications, that this is the traditional applications that we use today, think Facebook, Instagram, you open up your phone and you connect directly to the data centers of these companies. Every single action you take is connecting to this massive server farm that hosts all of the data for billions of people. If you share a photo and I view that photo, you've uploaded the photo to these massive server farms. I've communicated to the same location and pulled the photos back down.

And millions and millions of people are doing this every day. Billions of people have this information. This is a model that is very problematic because all this data is stored in these massive, massive data farms, and everyone who can gain access to these farms can also see your data and also has the ability to manipulate the information. I'll talk about a new model, which is the decentralized model. So with decentralized applications, it's very different. Instead, each of our data is stored in our own private personal clouds. If you have a photo and you want to share it with me, I will go and I will grab it from your personal cloud, and the same thing in reverse. The data goes directly between us and it happens with every person who's involved in

the entire system. This, we believe, this trend of decentralization is the next wave of the internet, internet 3.0. So there's the early internet, there was the internet 2.0 which really moved to the cloud. And internet 3.0 is marked by decentralization. As mentioned earlier, I'm the co-founder of a network of a platform called Blockstack. And this is a platform for decentralized applications, for developers to build them, for consumers to discover them. And if you go to Blockstack.org today, you can go and sign up, you can create your identity,

and start playing around with some of these decentralized applications. And I'll highlight three decentralized applications that exist today that you can use today. So one of them is called graphite. And this is an application for collaborative, document editing. So you can think Google Suite, Google documents, and Google sheets, but in a way that's decentralized. That means that we can collaborate on a document or a spreadsheet.

And there isn't a Google that is coordinating these edits. That's pretty groundbreaking, right? We are directly collaborating on these documents between our computers, right? And there's actually a journalist, Tom Simonite at WIRE. who wrote an article about graphite, and he wrote the article in graphite itself. The second application I want to highlight requires a quick introduction.

We saw that Signal, you know, it's a very important application for private chat, potentially the most secure that exists today. But one of the challenges with Signal is it's being censored around the world, and there's many people who don't actually have access to that application. They've been using civilized

sophisticated measures, using the tools that Amazon and Google provide to be able to circumvent this, but even now they're hitting roadblocks that are very hard for them to overcome. One of the challenges with Signal is that it's still produced and distributed by a single corporation. There's still one version of the application. If Signal were a decentralized application and any developer could publish a version of Signal on a decentralized chat communication network, then it would be a lot easier to distribute the application to people who need to be able to access it. There's actually a decentralized chat application today

that you can use. It's called stealthy. And this is very important because the software is open source, you can download it. And when we communicate, we communicate directly between our devices, directly between our personal clouds. And the third application that I want to highlight is one that's very, very important for democracy.

We saw how social media has been so critical in promoting communication and promoting the ability for freedom fighters to be able to congregate and to be able to influence their nations for the greater good. Of course, there are some also dark sides of social media, but we need to focus on ways that we can move it forward

and continually improve. And some of the ways that we can move beyond the existing model of social media is to move to a model where we have decentralized social media. We saw how, There are so many great benefits to email being decentralized. We need social media to be decentralized in the same way that email is.

If we can do that, then that means we can have a choice of our own software. We can evade censorship. We can have data sharing on our own terms. We can have increased privacy. And when there are challenges to fake news or the way that our feeds are being influenced with advertisements in ways that we don't like, we can always switch to a different version of the software on the same network. So you can see how this decentralization of the network

and the competition of software between developers is critical to enabling us to move forward and have social media that truly supports truth and truly supports privacy and safety and freedom. And these types of applications mark the future, mark a way forward for us to live in a much, more free world. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. I'm Galia Ben-Artsi, founder of the Bank Corps Protocol. I just want to start by saying that I speak frequently in front of tech audiences and innovation audiences and financial audiences, and never have I been more humbled and grateful than to speak

in front of those who fight for freedom. So thank you. So the future of money and user-generated currencies. I really want to use our time up here to zoom out a bit and talk about money itself, what it is, why we need it, why we have it, where maybe it went wrong and how we might be able to fix it. And I start with this slide. Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. This photo was taken in downtown Palo Alto, where I grew up in the heart of the Silicon Valley and blessed with every human right, truly, that one can imagine. And in Silicon Valley, the mandate and the ethos is that we can design and invent our way out of problems and that we can manifest the future through technology.

Another book that I love to share as a backdrop here is Sapiens by Yuval Harari. And in the beginning of this book, he distinguishes how humans are different than other animals on a level of consciousness. And the way that we're different, he explains, is stories. We tell each other stories. We tell ourselves stories. And these stories govern our organizational ability and truly this arc of humanity over time.

So as a quick example, if you were to put 100,000 apes in Times Square, you would very quickly see violence and chaos more than likely. However, if you put 100,000 humans in Times Square, we generally figure it out. And that is because of the stories that we've told ourselves over generations, stories like how to behave in Times Square, stories like walk on green, stop on red, traffic lights are here to protect you. And there are billions of other stories truly that we tell ourselves.

And the reason I bring this up is that money is one of these stories. money is a story that we've told ourselves about how we can collaborate as a society. So in the beginning of time, we didn't have money. Money wasn't here before we were. We brought it into fruition. We invented it. There are many reasons for this and some of the most obvious are that in small groups, we had the trust, the innate trust and the belief in the other people we were working with

to not need to keep track of who was giving what and who. who had what. We simply did what we did. We woke up and we grew the food and we fed the people and we got the water and we clothed the children and we did the things that we call living and we did them without any need for accounting of who was doing what or a kind of non-quantitative accounting. As our collaboration grew into larger and larger groups, not just in our family, but in our tribe, not just in our tribe, but with other tribes. And fast forward to today, not just in our city or our neighborhood, but in our country and in all of the countries, we developed this shared accounting system, this tool for human collaboration at scale,

and this accounting system in its most pure form, in its ideal form maybe, is meant to tell us whether any individual, ourselves included, is in balance with the system. supposedly, if we have a lot of money, what that indicates to others and to the system is that we have given a lot to society. We have given a lot to other people. We have sold goods and services. We have helped.

We have contributed. We have invented. We have provided some kind of value that allowed this money to flow our way. And our big stack of money is meant to show people how much we've given and then to afford us to receive in return, not necessarily from the person that gave to us.

but from someone else in the system. It's a systemic flow accounting technology. So let's talk a little bit about money, what we actually used for this accounting system, what money has been and what it is today. So what we call money 1.0, money came from the earth. Right? We all remember this time money was gold, money was silver,

money was salt, money was oil, money was sticks or seashells, physical objects from the earth that we could all point to and say, you know, that's our accounting system. If you have a lot of it, you've given, and if you have not a lot of it, you haven't given, and we strive to stay in balance with the system, ideally. Money 2.0, and this is the era that we're in today and perhaps changes upon us. In Money 2.0, money comes from the government, right? So the government of every nation has been given the responsibility and the privilege to decide what is money, how much of it there is, and most of

Most importantly, who gets it when it's fresh off the printing press or fresh off the digital press? Where does it go and how is it distributed in society? And now we enter what I believe is the most exciting era of money. And this is the era where money comes from the people. And when I say people, I mean the people who invented Bitcoin, the people who invented Ethereum, me and my team who invented a currency called Bankor, and thousands and thousands. and thousands of other teams out there that are inventing currency after currency, many of them you have heard of, many more of them you haven't heard of, and these are what we call

cryptocurrencies today. And so when money comes from the people, we have a completely different paradigm, right? Because any one of these people can make a completely different decision about how they're creating the money, and most importantly, who gets it? What is the distribution mechanism for these monies, what is the monetary policy for any one of these currencies? So you might ask yourself at this moment, and this is what me and my team did six years ago at the beginning of a very long startup struggle, was why can't anyone just make a money? We have the internet, we have smartphones, we have marketplaces. What is actually preventing us, side from laws on the books?

What is actually preventing humans from making money? The jig is up. Money is what you believe it to be. If I make a money and you accept it, it's money. So why isn't everyone doing this? And what we discovered is that what makes a money, actually money, what gives it its value to begin with, is its liquidity. A liquid currency is a valuable currency,

an e-liquid currency is play money. Right? And liquidity is the ability to have someone else accept your money at some given time for the good or service that you want, including some other money that you might want to trade your money for, and this liquidity is the lifeblood of a currency. And until today, we have only known these currencies to be liquid, generally. There are a few outliers to this map,

and of course today, Bitcoin and Ethereum and some of the other currencies, join this map, but you can count these currencies on a few hands. These are a few hundreds of currencies that are liquid because the government's distribution of them has ensured to other people in other countries that they can use this money for some kind of goods and services. And of course, the exchange rates fluctuate and tell us how reliable is that promise of any given money. So I'll walk you through a very brief experiment that my team and I did called community

currency in Tel Aviv, in Israel. We minted a digital currency called Hearts. In Hebrew, the word is lev, and this marketplace was called the heart market, Lev market. This currency was created for mothers, and it was issued to mothers, and over 20,000 mothers joined the currency collective, and essentially could earn these hearts for doing things that were valuable to this community of mothers. Those were things like volunteering in the schools, volunteering in the after-school programs, tutoring the children, picking up someone else's child from school and bringing them home,

babysitting, baking a cake for a birthday party, really anything that you can imagine that was valuable to these families. They received the hearts for joining, they received the hearts for bringing other women into the network, and they received the hearts for contributing in what we might call sweat equity to the community.

And then they could spend these hearts with other mothers in the community, and what we discovered was astounding. In under a year, 20,000 mothers performed over $24 million dollars worth of transactions, of commerce between them, just in hearts. Not a shekel, not a dollar, ever changed hands. And what we asked ourselves was, why weren't they doing this to begin with? We didn't really invent anything here. All the mothers were there before. All the goods and services

were there before. And of course, Israel has a national currency, the shekel, just like most countries have a national currency. And it's not even a very volatile or vulnerable one. And so why wasn't this commerce happening before the hearts entered the scene. And the answer was, these mothers didn't have any shekels in their pockets. Specifically, these mothers were from low-income or at-risk communities, and all of the shekels that they had access to were allocated, to rent, to food, to school, to gas, to bills and health insurance, and all of the other payments. And there were no shekels left over at the end of the day to buy a birthday cake for a birthday party or to buy new toys or new clothes or things we might call discretionary spending. And so what we realized in this experiment was

that when we injected a community with more money, and of course that exercise involves trust and execution and user experience and all of the things. But when we injected a high quality currency tool into a community, commerce happened. People gave to each other, people bought from each other. People collaborated around local needs and goods and services in the community. And there was incredible abundance achieved in a short time. I take you now to this book, Rethinking Money, by Bernard Leotar, who became the president of the Bank Corps Foundation. He's well known as being one of the co-creators of the Euro. And in fact, he's one of the co-creators of the Euro project. He came from the Central Bank of Belgium, who abandoned the Euro project as it was being

let's call it redesigned by the politicians for other needs. And what Bernard has to say is that somewhere between one currency per nation and one currency per person is the right number of currencies for us to have true abundance among people. It's certainly more than one per nation. It's likely less than one per person. And it's somewhere in the middle. And the paradigm that he describes with community currency,

and why we might want to have more than one currency per nation really is the spectrum between efficiency and resilience. Both good things, both bad things. And I leave you also with this thought that nothing is binary, right? Everything is a conversation. Even freedom can lead to democracies that lead to elections that lead to leaders that we may not consider good or bad, right? And so on this spectrum of efficiency and resilience,

basically he says one world currency would be the most efficient the most efficient thing we can imagine no exchange rates everybody understands the money we print it in one place we give it to everyone it's highly efficient just like a bulldozer that can log the entire rainforest in five minutes is highly highly efficient however is efficiency the thing that we're striving for is it the thing that we're striving for above all and this is the question today that we find our social in capitalist societies as well. On the other side of the spectrum of efficiency, we have resilience.

That rainforest is not very resilient to a very efficient bulldozer. Communities are not very resilient to very efficient monetary systems that suck jobs away to lower income or more efficient labor economies, right? And so these are economic questions that are more about ethics

than they are about math. because the technology itself, money included, is morally agnostic, and the designers of the technology, the people, are the ones to endow it with the morals that we choose. And so Bernard notices that the UN Sustainable Development Goals that we talk about a lot here amount to about $4 trillion. It would cost about $4 trillion, according to the UN, to solve almost all of our existential problems.

You guys are familiar with this list, human trafficking, water, safety, all of the basic human rights and basic human needs. $4 trillion, who's going to pay? And we look around, and I think all of us experience that deflationary feeling, that no one is going to agree ever to contribute these $4 trillion to solve these problems. And so what Bernard has to say is, why don't we mint a new $4 trillion? Why are we still relying on the old dollars, the old euros, the old yen's, the old money to solve our problems when clearly it has been shown that the system itself gravitates towards the type of outcomes that we see today. So this graph is meant to describe a phenomenon in the internet that we call the long tail.

Has anyone heard of this term before? So the long tail is the phenomenon that says when you lower technical, barriers to entry, you have two to three orders of magnitude of volume in folks who might try to use a tool and approach a tool than you would otherwise. And so the thesis here is that if you lower technical barriers to entry, if you allow people to create their own currencies, and we're talking currencies you can't even imagine yet, currencies that link their money supply to the temperature of the earth, currencies that reward the teachers in a community before the bankers, Any monetary policy that you can imagine can today be coded into cryptocurrencies and manifest into society.

And so this long tail is what value looks like when not only governments or maybe large corporations can issue currency tools, but truly anyone can try, anyone can approach the platforms, anyone can mint a money. And we'll see two to three orders of magnitude of the value between people than we do today. Thank you. Good morning. I'm here to answer this question and to give you an overview of what I've been observing

over the last few years, essentially the rise of the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism, enabled by technology. William Gibson has this famous quote, which is the future is already here just unevenly distributed. Most people see this as a utopian kind of ideal

as like as long as we just keep keep waiting, we'll have the Jetsons or some other perfect world. I see it in a very more dystopian way right now when it comes to surveillance. We have incredibly powerful technologies being developed by states and by companies that are leading to a kind of world that we may not observe all the time in Norway or other parts of the world, but when you travel to different parts of the world like China, you start feeling it in a very visceral way. years ago, Nico Sell stood on the stage to talk about the growth of this and the prediction that this was going to happen. And I think in the last four years, we've seen in many different

ways, whether it's from states or companies, in a very real way, the rise of this kind of environment. For example, recently in China, citizens protested by throwing paper airplanes, which is the symbol of the telegram messaging app. And telegram was shut down. And telegram was shut down in a very severe way after they refused to hand over keys to the FSB to allow the FSB to actually access the messages that were going through the platform. Russia. Thank you. Thank you for correcting me.

Yes. This is in Russia. You're right. China, Russia. I'm sorry. Thank you for lightening this up. And they did in such a severe way that they actually blocked huge portions of IP addresses. They're just willing to do it.

just shut down the internet in sections in Russia. Moving up to China, the social credit system. The social credit system is literally like some kind of episode from Black Mirror's TV series. And this is real. This is happening. It's about to launch. And essentially, every action you take, every kind of interaction, any commercial action you take affects your social credit score.

And already millions of people have been blocked from flights in China. And I don't know if you about you guys, but this is like terrifying. to me. And not only that, but China's now actually Chinese companies are developing these technologies and capable of exporting them and already exporting them to different countries. Closer to home, I live in San Francisco, this recent situation with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, I think helps people understand that this isn't just a state issue.

There are companies out there now, and I think we're all starting to wake up to the fact that the current business models of most of the major internet platforms is based upon gathering your information and selling it, and gathering your information and selling it. And every time you subscribe, every time you give something up, every time you click that little button that says, yes, it's okay to track me, yes, it's okay to take this data and use it, you're buying into the system. And you have no choice, because what else are you going to do? You're not going to me on Facebook? You're not going to me on Twitter. These are the mechanisms by which we engage each other right now in a distributed society. Going back in time a little bit,

in the late 1800s in England, my home country, there was a prison called a panopticon. And this prison was fascinating in the sense that the prisoners had no idea whether they were being surveilled. The warden was shielded from them, but he was shining a light into all of the different prisons in this architecture. And essentially everybody had to behave

as if they were being surveilled at any point in time because they had no idea whether they were being surveilled at any point in time. And the point of this, example is really that the architecture that we build, whether it's physical architecture or technological architecture, influences the culture that we create. And I believe this is even more important today. Another example of this in the real world here now today is in the Xinjiang province of China. This is a predominantly Islamic area in China, and the surveillance and enforcement of

surveillance is so intense it includes DNA testing, it includes capturing people's phones at checkpoints and checking to see what kind of applications they have and stripping the ones off that they or potentially locking people up if they have the wrong kind of applications that are not state authorized. And the point again is that with this kind of surveillance, people just behave as if they are being surveilled all the time. So it's the point that you don't even need to have such intense surveillance after a while. And again, Chinese companies are now essentially weaponizing, productizing this technology, and currently exporting it to other countries in the world that want to have this kind of control.

So surveillance really is this mechanism. Surveillance and censorship are intrinsically linked, and the future of surveillance and data gathering is going to be driven by the people who are concentrating this information, concentrating the information about you, whether it's governments or corporations, and then controlling you. The ScoreBet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking.

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reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. Yvall Harari recently gave an amazing TED talk where he really talked about this specific issue of how the greatest danger that we've faced to contemporary liberal democracies

is this concentration of power into the hands of a few and how fascism becomes a very tempting thing to build. I think it's very important to think about this is like we are moving towards this environment because of the centralization of the systems. So what can we do? So whoever controls the data determines the future, so what? I see this as an existential choice.

So essentially we have these two extremes. We have complete control, total surveillance, or we have full anonymity. Now people are usually terrified when I say this. Like imagine if you lived in the world where you could literally communicate. without being surveilled. You could actually access whatever information you wanted to. And the usual response I get is,

well, what about all the bad people? So, yeah, what about all the bad people? Well, the bad people use technology just like good people do. But unlike Theresa May, who believes that every time there's some kind of incident, we must ban all encryption,

which is interesting, given that the city of London relies on it for all of its trading, I don't believe that encryption causes bad behavior. I think that, as Gary was saying, people cause bad behavior. And my friend Zucco actually gave me this quote. He said last year, as I was starting this project with my team,

that he said, you know, if you get this right, I'll explain what we're doing in a minute. The internet could actually be the last place on the world where you have privacy. And I think that I'm not sure there's any cameras in here surveilling me. I'm sure these TV ones are. But you just walk down the street, take a look. Where I'm from in England, there are more closer circuit TV cameras per person

anywhere in the world. And also no bill of rights, by the way, so be grateful if you have one. And I think there's something to think about here is what if the internet can be the last place that we can actually communicate securely, privately, without surveillance? So how do we

do this? My belief is that you need to distribute the architecture. Otherwise, you have central points of control. And when I explain these two extremes, people say, well, can't we have some kind of like halfway house where someone we really trust holds the keys and holds the data. And I say,

well, we're not doing too good at trusting central parties, so the third parties. Governments, banks, remember 2008? And the technologies I've been working on for a while now are fundamentally based on distributing the architecture and removing central third parties. Project that my team and I started last year is called Orchid. Company's called Orchid Labs. And we are focused on this idea of building a system which gives you the capability to have anti-surveillance and anti-censorship technology at a very low level in order to be able to build applications that can take advantage of these systems. A little bit about the architecture. I won't get too technical here.

You can ask me later. Essentially, we model our company and everything we do based around attack vectors. and trying to build resistance to attack vectors. The basic architecture is what's called an overlay network. It sits on top of the regular internet, and traffic is routed through a series of nodes, each of which is encrypting and routing traffic in an efficient way, and allows the user to essentially be completely invisible

in terms of who they are and where they came from and what they're doing to any of the people wanting to monitor in the middle, or to the final resources, whether it's a website or a virtual reality app, app, a game. So what can you build on top of these things? Well, first of all, secure communications, the ability to have messaging apps that don't have a central third party. If you go to China, you really have one choice. We chat. There are a couple of other ones, state-sponsored ones, but that's your choice. And if we entered into a totalitarian environment in any of the

countries that we live in, I think the very first thing people would do is take out the messaging apps. Or say, this thing now needs to be centralized and controlled and monitored by the government. And if you try and type certain things into WeChat, they don't end up on the other side. That's it gets filtered automatically. Social networks we've heard about a little bit, and we'll recognize these problems here. One of the primary examples we're focused on first is actually secure access to the Internet. I mentioned many countries so far, but there are literally countries where you just can't access the sort of things that we expect to be able to access by default here. And that leads to, first of all, surveillance, if somebody's trying to access a site that,

is not allowed. Then they are monitored. They are questioned. Censorship, you can't access information. You can't find out what actually happened at Tiananmen Square, for example, in China. And finally, I think there's some interesting spaces around distributed marketplaces and basically whatever app you want to build. This is a core belief that I have and our team has, and we believe that choosing freedom, choosing the way that you build things, the way the architecture that you build fundamentally affects the culture of the systems and this kind of society we live in. I guess that's the end. Thanks very much. Good morning. So my name is Arthur Brateman. I work on a blockchain project called Tezos.

And I'm going to be talking about blockchains as coordination technology and trying to give a sense of what it is exactly that they do and what they can be good for. So there's a French philosopher Etienne de la Boise who wrote the treaties on voluntary servitude. And in these treaties, he wonders, how can it be that you can have a tyrant in power? And he's just a single person. And you have a population that could be in the millions. They do not recognize as the intimacy. And so they could very easily topple him, but for some reason they don't.

And the question is, well, is that voluntary servitude? And the answer to this paradox in game theory is known as a prisoner's dilemma. So in a prisoner's dilemma, you have two prisoners who are being interrogated, and it can either decide that they're going to dish on the other one and say, you know, he did it, give all the information, in which case they will both get a, both of them will get a heavy sentence if they both betray each other. If they collaborate, they get a lie sentence. and here's a problem.

If one collaborates and the other one betrays, the one who betrays goes free. And so in this scenario, you might look at this and say, well, clearly they would benefit by collaborating with each other and not betraying each other. However, if I don't know what the other prisoner is going to be doing, I say, well, either they're going to betray me, in which case I should betray them, I might as well,

or they're not going to betray me, in which case I still benefit from betraying them. So both sides can think the same thing, and they both betray each other, and you get this poor outcome. And this is described as the fact that what is a Nash equilibrium. So a Nash equilibrium is the equilibrium you have in a game

when every size reasons independently of the other by saying, okay, they're going to follow a strategy, and regardless of which strategy they're going to follow, I need to find what strategy I'm going to follow. follow? So that's a Nash equilibrium. Well, what we would like is something called a parato equilibrium. And in a parato equilibrium, you're in a solution where everyone, you know, you can't make anyone better off by changing things. And so clearly in the case of the prisoners, they could be both better off by not betraying. So you don't have a parieto equilibrium. But that's

and that's a problem. How do you get there? Interestingly, the way they can get there is not communication. Even if they can talk to each other, it's not clear that it helps because talk is cheap. They can keep talking, they can keep exchanging information, but at the end of the day, once they've done discussing, they're still going to be faced with the same decision. The one thing that can make a difference is contract. If they are able to make a contract with each other, they can do credible commitments, a contract with some penalty for breaking the contract. So if they can have this ability to coordinate with something real at stake,

with value, with money, then perhaps now they can start coordinating. So that's a generic idea of how you solve the Prismosil dilemma, and it turns out that you can solve all of these problems in game series where

you have, everyone could be better off if only people collaborated but they can't collaborate. All of that, at least in theory, can be solved by contracting. If you let people have self-enforcing contracts. Now, the problem is contracts can be difficult to create,

and they can be expensive. And so one of the interests of this blockchain is that they allow this type of cooperation. Now, when people talk about these blockchain's network, like Bitcoin, for example, a very common metaphor is to look at the Internet. And people say, oh, look, it's just like the internet. It's all these people communicating with each other.

But I think that what this metaphor misses is that it's not about communication. It's not about data. It's really about putting something valuable at stake when coordinating. So what can you do with something that leads to coordinate? Well, the first thing you can do is you can do money, right? So blockchains are mostly known for powering cryptocurrencies. So you can build these units, you can trade in those units, and that, it turns out, is a really important building block for contracts. Money is coordination, right?

It's the idea that we're all going to agree that we're going to give some value to some unit, and I'm going to agree to accept it with the ideas that someone else might accept it in the future. Money is the closest thing that we have to a real, to some sort of real social contract. you'll see a lot of users of blockchains being discussed because obviously this was a big surprise that you could do money like this and it could work and so there's a lot of hype around blockchains and there's also a lot of solutions

which don't necessarily make sense so one thing to beware of you'll see sometimes a problem and people will say well clearly we could solve that problem if somehow we could throw a new technology at it, we can solve it. So if there's data in my problem, I'm going to take that data, and I will put that data on a blockchain. And since blockchains can hold data,

and since my problem involves data, and since blockchains are good and new, then it's going to solve my problem. And that generally doesn't work. There's been a focus on traceability, on tracking information, saying, oh, we're going to put the information. on where goods came from in the blockchain. Most of that doesn't quite actually work

because it doesn't tap into the ability of blockchins to work as coordinating mechanism. So I think that if you're looking for purported solutions using blockchain, you have to look for this coordination element. And so today when you look at this public's blockchain and the type of things that they do, so you have this one side who says, look, we can do all of these things, but they're not necessarily compelling applications

outside of really money and contracts. And you have another side that looks at this and say, well, sure, you can do money and contracts with these blockchains, but you can do all of that with the database, right? You know, why do you need decentralization at all? Why do you need to go through the complicated exercise of having a cryptographic protocol, your network, notes talking to each other. You could just have a single company doing that,

or you could have the government run it. You know, why isn't the government running a cryptocurrency? And the conclusion that some people reach is they look at this and say, well, clearly, the only reason you might want to not run this as a government database is because you're trying to break the law and, you know, all this Bitcoin and all of that. This is all for criminals. And that's a very dangerous argument. because the argument that these people are making is that whenever people are trying to reclaim some power, to reserve some power for themselves and not completely give it away for the government, somehow they're doing something bad.

And the implication here is that government is always necessarily virtuous. And we know that's not the case. There's plenty of evidence to that. Governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century. Governments kill people today. A quarter of the countries on earth are dictatorships. So the idea that somehow reserving some rights for the people to protect themselves is somehow nefarious is that that itself is an extremely dangerous idea that needs to be fought.

So to conclude briefly on what these blockchains can do, blockchains are good at coordination. And what coordination can enable is taking diluted interest. A lot of people who are in vast numbers and share some interest and putting it against concentrated interest. Thank you. Cryptocurrency is vibrant and exciting, but it's not without its share of bad actors. Exchanges and personal accounts can get hacked. Computers can be infected with malware.

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That's M-E-S-M-R.TV. Or find all episodes at www.com. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our panel, blockchain versus the... surveillance state. My name's Laura Shin. I'm a crypto journalist covering crypto, as I just said, in blockchain technology. And during the press conference preceding this panel, we had an impassioned discussion around whether there's a moral equivalency between imperfect democracies and dictatorships. And as an American whose ancestors come from North Korea, I would definitely say that there is not

a moral equivalency. However, you will hear in this discussion that we do talk about, the dangers and potentials within this technology to combat overreaches of both governments and corporations. And I also wanted to echo Gilea's sentiments earlier that I'm so honored to be speaking and exploring the ramifications of this technology here in front of people who are fighting for freedom. I hope that through this panel you will learn not only about the potential for these technologies to do good, but also for the dangers that.

they hold within them because, as you can see from the speeches before, that it is, you know, a double-edged sword. And so one note before we begin, which is that you can tweet questions at us. We're not going to be taking questions here in the room, but you can tweet questions, and when you pose your question, just tag at OsloFF so that we can see your tweet and know that it's directed for this panel. And without further ado, we will begin with our Four speakers, Ryan, Arthur, Galea, and Stephen. So before we began this discussion, I actually read a book by Dave Eggers. It was made into a movie called The Circle, and that depicts a dystopian society.

I'll just briefly describe it for those of you who did not get to either read the book or see the movie, but it depicts a company in this dystopian world where essentially it's a company that has aspects of what we would recognize. is Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, 23 and Me, Ancestry.com, Spotify. I try to write them all down, Apple Health, Fitbit, and many others that I probably didn't even notice, the credit score companies. And something that was interesting is that before the panel, I'd been thinking, like, oh, this is kind of this sci-fi world. But, you know, another question that I was going to pose to the audience was about

we chat in China. and eventually it dawned on me that actually WeChat is probably not that dissimilar from this company because what happens in the book is that this starts out as a private company, but eventually by the end it sort of merges with the state. And it becomes obviously quite creepy. But here we are in this situation where we do have a company like WeChat. It is a company, but it is very close with the Chinese government. It does allow the government to censor and surveil the transactions of the users on the platform.

So a question that I wanted to pose for you guys was how you believe blockchain technology could be used to either combat or prevent situations like what we're seeing now with WeChat or in this dystopian future depicted in the circle. I actually think that, this is a son? I actually think that blockchain technology can completely enable that future if used in the wrong way. So I don't think the blockchain technology is necessarily a solution. I think it's very much on the design of the system. And the examples of this is the crypto-ruble from China, which is being designed by the guys who built Kiri, which essentially is Russia's response to Visa MasterCard.

Essentially Russia saw built out Kiri and sponsored that company to face the existential threat of the EU. US shutting down these are a master card. Essentially, the future is not necessarily physical war, it's economic war. It's crypto war. And so that system includes blockchain components, but it has very strict KIC, very strict tracking of information. And then you see some cell phone companies integrating blockchain technology into the chips,

which, if done in the right way, is great, it's really helpful. And not done in the wrong way, then that links your location to your payment information, to your identity, et cetera, and it's stored in the blockchain. So it's very much how you design the system. Yeah, so let's draw that out a little bit further because as you guys saw from the presentations, blockchains are immutable ledgers of transactions. And so it done in the wrong way, it can actually create a situation where data that you may not want about you will be permanently recorded somewhere. So how can you design a system in a way that is, you know, good and is kind of in like,

with what all the goals of a conference like this are about, and then what are the ways in which it could be designed where it could be used for nefarious purposes? So I'll jump in and say that maybe on the positive side around this technology, and Ryan mentioned it as well, which is that once you reduce the technical barriers to entry and you let folks use these tools, it's in many ways like a point of no return,

So, for example, one of the strongest ways that nefarious governments, and also, let's call them regular governments, used to control the people is they control the money. If they freeze your bank account, if they put sanctions on your nation, this is one of the most accessible ways to control the behavior of another is to restrict their money supply so that they can't operate within society. If you allow folks to create new money supplies, you can sort of, circumvent a lot of that pressure. Think of the example of Greece. Greece finds itself in a financial crisis where all the euros are leaving Greece. All the people are still in Greece. All the factories are still in Greece. All the needs and wants are still in Greece, but the money is

gone. And so the countries at a standstill and the people really suffer. If the people or anyone amongst the people could create a currency and have, obviously, the network effect and the credibility and the mutable ledger and the trust in that currency to kind of jumpstart commerce. Even locally, it could serve as a bridge until bigger solutions are found, until the euros return to the country, and all of the other things. So I think the answer to the question is not how do we design the perfect system, and I don't think any technologist or company or advocate or activist can design the perfect system. I think the idea is to design a decentralized system that constantly lets new entrants access it and build new tools and build new solutions and keep it open.

Yeah, building off of what Ghali said, we were just at this conference a couple weeks ago called Consensus, which is this kind of industry conference for the blockchain industry. There was pretty incredible there. I was just thinking of the graph that you put up that showed the long tail of all the different currencies and crypto projects. There are literally thousands of companies in this industry that are building different blockchains, cryptocurrencies, applications, protocols and services.

So that's, I think, if you look at that, that's, there's an entire industry that's been created with companies that are, companies and individuals that are all around the world.

You know, there's actually no single central location where it's centered. That's really important because there's like a point at which, you know, it becomes so large and pervasive that it's like, you can't put that back in the box.

And we have to make sure that we focus more and I think like building industries and building like competition into the system as opposed to like relying upon single individual corporations like signal, you know, that even they can be censored and shut down. Even they can be targeted. We need to we need to strive for entire industries really taking a technology and allowing it to pervade all of the professionals around the world. So it just becomes part of our of our fabric. And I think, you know, I'll just make another comment, I think there are certain technologies that, you know, any technology can be used for good or for bad. But I think there's certain technologies that lend themselves either more on the side of consolidating power or more on the side of distributing power. You know, you look at like one very famous one is gunpowder, right, and the gun. That was, you know, often referred to as the great equalizer, partly because it really shifted the dynamics of warfare and really helped, create the distribution of power, a very important thing. And so I do think that while there are some parallels of blockchain technology, it's very similar

to gunpowder and that it can distribute, you know, if we actually approach it the right way and that it can distribute power to people around the world and give them increased access, especially through things like the ability to choose your own software and the ability to fork a system. Yeah, I think those are all really important points, but I actually want to circle back a little bit to what Gahlia was saying. because we had a question coming on Twitter earlier about the Petro, which is a cryptocurrency that was created by Chavez in Venezuela,

and it's supposedly backed by the value of the oil reserves there in Venezuela. However, I think most people in the crypto world at least view this as an example of kind of a nefarious actor trying to use this technology in a way that probably doesn't further the ideals that are generally within this community. And one of the Oslo Freedom Forum members, who is from Venezuela, told me that there was a point in 2007 where they basically locked off three zeros from the currency. So if you had a thousand bolivars, suddenly it was one. And since then, hyperinflation has taken off,

and she said that at one point it was something like a thousand bolivars to a dollar. And now it's $8,883,000 on the black market, she said, but the official rate is $80,000. So hyperinflation is actually. something that a lot of people in the blockchain and crypto asset community discussed. So can you talk a little bit about how you think that this technology can help fight that? I'll say that the technology is always part of the problem and part of the solution.

What's beautiful coming from a software background is that software allows us to program ideas into the application. So I would leave it to the economists in a room or to the mathematicians in a room or to the social. anthropologist interim to suggest ways that we can combat inflation and currency, and there are many, many ideas out there. For example, Demirage. Demirage is a negative interest. So it basically says that currency expires over time, meaning that if you hold it, you lose it. And so the way to get the most benefit or the bang for your buck is to spend it and to pass it on and that that's what money is essentially made to do is to spend and not to hold. So it's just one example. And Demaraj can be very easily programmed into a cryptocurrency, and so can many other monetary

policies. So I think the bigger frame that I see really is the access to the tools and letting folks try their ideas and program them into currencies and run pilots and see what happens, and also kind of having the empathy as a collective for the process we need to go through. I think someone mentioned it in the press conference, which was you don't go from dictatorship to democracy in kind of... one step, right? There's a process there around education, transparency, conflict resolution, compromise, different things that contribute to a healthy democracy. And the same with this,

right? You don't go from national currencies and the regime that we've been under of national currencies and this economic slavery that many people can point to. You don't go from that to, great, anyone can make a currency, it's going to be amazing in one fell swoop. There's a process. There's a lot of learning to be had. And as long as we open up the tools to everyone to try, we'll be kind of getting the best ideas and learnings from the entire population. And how do we prevent things like the petro or just deal with them? Or what do you make of the petro? That was the question from Twitter that I wanted to mention somebody from Venezuela was asking what you guys think of them. I think one really cool thing is I think that a lot of people don't fully appreciate is that

you can take the, you know, when you move these currencies to a blockchain, system, they're now part of this decentralized database that can be just forked. You know, someone can copy the database, create a new version, and then they can change anything about it. That means that governments could, of course, you know, take money away from individual citizens, at the same time the citizens could collectively take money away from the government. You could actually imagine that if the citizens have the ability to coordinate together, they can just delete the balance of the government, and now the government can't pay the military, and now the government can't actually enforce anything. So the military just

leaves and then they're like they turn on the dictator. So I think there are actually, now that's obviously very difficult, but it changes money into an idea. And if everyone can agree upon the same idea, then everyone can change the reality. I would say you have to look at the, you know, like the gunpowder, you have to look at the balance of things. Anything you do can be used by anyone. If you can find a way to increase crop yields and all of a sudden, you know, some

dictatorships has lower costs for fear. feeding their army. You know, that's, this type of things happen. And so, yeah, it's possible that states like Venezuela might decide

to issue their cryptocurrencies, but you have to look on the balance. You know, our cryptocurrency is something that is making the dictatorship in Venezuela better off or worse off. And I think the balance is clearly worse off

because it prevents their ability. I think maybe not enough today because these technologies are fairly new, but in a long run, this is a type of technology that will prevent them from just basically stealing their entire population's money by debasing the currency. So, you know, on the balance, it makes them far less powerful.

And I also wanted to ask you, I know that your grandfather has an interesting story from Nazi Germany, and I feel like that story, if you can tell it, but then also relate it to your thoughts on blockchain. I mean, so it's an interesting story. I mean, it's many people's story. My grandfather in France was sent to the camps in France. Germany and fortunately survived in the same time the rest of my family was flying through France

but just a more general lesson is a very popular instrument in Jewish culture is a violin as opposed to the piano because it's much easier to take a violin with you in a pogrom than a grand piano and likewise you see

a lot of lawyers and doctors among the Jews. My grandfather was a doctor and one of the reasons you become a doctor or lawyer is because you're building capital that you can keep in your head, right? Because if you're trying to build up capital by being a landowner and you get expropriated, that doesn't work so well. And cryptocurrencies is the first time that you can actually hold value in your head that's more liquid than just a doctor's trading or a lot degree. So I think that's something that's

really, really new and fairly interesting. And again, you know, when my family fled to to avoid the camps. They were breaking the law. Wow. So I also actually wanted to discuss Stephen's project because when I talked with Stephen before this panel, he mentioned that he is an ethicist

on staff. And I wanted to ask you kind of what are the questions that you guys pose and then when you make decisions about how to design your protocol, how do you make those decisions? Carefully. Yes, it's we're very conscious of that choice I was talking about,

sort of existential choice between full control and essentially anonymity. And, you know, when you build a system that has the capability to give people, you know, complete shield from censorship and surveillance, you have to carefully think through the issues that are involved in that. And so it's definitely our mind a lot of the time. And, you know, my personal perspective is that, like Gary was saying, you know, people do bad things. And I don't think that, I also believe that, you know, increased access information and real information is going to create a better society. but there are clearly challenges when you create technologies

that allow people to be completely invisible to observation. And do you think there is any way to design it to either discourage or prevent people like terrorists or like a nefarious state actor like North Korea from using your technology? Well, I guess my question back would be, what's the middle ground? Like, who do we trust?

You know, 2008 showed that we can't really trust banks And we've not been able to trust corporations We've seen that recently And we're, you know, most of us believe we can't trust the government So, so who is the trusted third party that we Anoint with the right to own our keys and our data So it's hard to find that middle ground So do any of you have any thoughts around that?

I mean, is it just sort of like, well, like we're going to design this as we feel like, and if they use it, they use it? I think about what you said, it's the crux of the matter, right? Trust. The whole technology is basically about trust and how do you create trust at scale. A, with people we don't know, billions of people we don't know, and B, given what we do know about human nature and like the prisoner's dilemma and all the other things we know about human nature and things we don't yet know, about human nature, which is, you know, how do we behave in situations of scarcity? How do we behave in situations of uncertainty?

How do we behave in situations of perceived threat, real threat, perceived threat? And so often you'll hear that blockchain is called the truth machine. And the reason that it's called the truth machine, one of the reasons is that all of the data, let's say, transactions that are stored on it cannot be tampered with. You can't go back to the email and change the text in the forwarded history in the bottom of the email. It's locked into what's called a block. And in order to make a change in a block, you would need over half of the network to agree with you, collude with you, on making that change. And so I think the idea behind trust is, again, a human and an ethical idea.

It's a question also of faith. And then it's a question of design and engineering and math and how much kind of systemic thinking can we put into aligning ourselves with the best possible outcomes the most times. And it doesn't mean there won't be abuses, right? But when folks ask me about terrorists using cryptocurrencies, I think of terrorists using cash and terrorists using all the other things that terrorists use. and I think how do we prevent terror from wanting to be enacted on others, right? What's the underlying? What's the root cause? Maybe we can't solve those causes.

Maybe we can try. But that choking off the crypto supply chain or the cash supply chain hasn't really prevented terrorism to date and there's no reason to think that it will prevent it moving forward. I would also point out that there's a big difference between Dragnet mass surveillance. and endpoints, you know, endpoint surveillance. So for hundreds of years, we've had, you know, ways to, for, like, law enforcement to get a warrant or to be able to collect information on individuals

and to enforce the law. And we have those many tools available to us today. A lot of these tools that help improve and increase privacy, they are looking to, you know, really change the land. enscape so that you don't have a situation where billions of people can be spot on at the same time. But it's important that we focus more on enforcing law and preventing bad actors from being able to harm people through the use of the very useful and traditional law enforcement tools that we've used for a long time.

So we've kind of talked about the pitfalls of this technology, but I just want to paint a picture because we sort of got it piecemeal a little bit through your species, but if kind of all of our ideals about how this technology might become developed come to fruition, then what could our world look like someday? You know, what would happen to the Wii Chats of the world or to the Facebook Cambridge Analytica type situations or the Equifax hack? What would a person's everyday life look like? So if you ask me, and what Bankruptor focuses on is allowing,

anyone to create a viable currency. We don't design the currencies. We designed our own currency, but we design the tools that will let others create currencies in their vision. So we threw out a few examples, but a burning man currency might reward the huggers or the gatekeepers or the garbage collectors and a teacher's currency might reward in different ways. So our vision is that the people themselves can gather around networks of value as they

see value in their vision. And so to me, what that says in a very practical sense is in terms of the labor force, folks will be able to live and make a living, doing what they're passionate about doing, doing what they're called to do. I think we all know so many people, whether directly or indirectly, that work for money, don't like their jobs, maybe even hate their jobs, maybe even don't believe in the thing that their company or their organization is doing, but they do it because we need the money, I think that we can flip this entire system on its head and have the money flow to the things we are actually called to do. And if that thing doesn't exist out there already as a job that you can get, then it's a job that you can make. And if it's creating value

for people, it will create value for you. So to me, what it looks like is more poets, more artists, more joy in our work, more people over profits, and finding ourselves less in this existential dilemma that I think we're all in and especially in a lot of the work that folks here do, which is choosing between what is right and what is profitable, what is right

and what is practical. I think the world where value creation can come from anywhere in society is a world where the thing that you're passionate about is also practical and it's practical to be human. I see it as before

we started Orchadis to have this sort of dinner party conversation with people and say, hey, you know that you've had these issues of surveillance, you know, you have this issues of, you know, you're using a wrong app, using a wrong messaging out, they're watching you. And even today, when I light up my phone or turn on my computer, I'm sitting there going, okay, I'm going to use this VPN app or I'm going to use this thing, and am I sure that, you know, I'm not being surveilled. I just assume I am at this point. So I think, you know, people would say, well, I can't do all these really complicated steps you're telling me to do. Why can't I just press a button and it just works? And so I'd like to see

future where you just press a button or you don't even think about pressing a button. You just know that you're not being watched. You're not being censored. That's, you know, large parts of the world where that is a reality for people, we're very lucky in most parts of the world that we visit and live in. That, yeah, sure, there's some companies monitoring things and we have some intense government surveillance, but we're not, like, directly under threat every single day for the things that we do online. Because most of us just aren't doing anything that's illegal or sketchy or whatever, but

it just changes one law in the country. It changes one move from political landscape from one extreme to another for that to change. And then the things that you like to do or imagine the legislation around marijuana in the US right now, there's certain areas where it's

okay, certain areas it's not. So you're going online and searching for that, maybe you're breaking the law, maybe you're not. Maybe they go back in time and say, oh, hey, we just change the rules and you were breaking the law back then. So I think that, you know, being able to express yourself, to express freedom, to search for information, to communicate freely, that's the kind of world I'd like to see us move to. And you just sort of glossed over, you said in the beginning that you assume that you're being surveilled at this point. Why did you say that?

It's just a good assumption to have. I mean, well, you live in the US, you... I've been blockchain for five years. You know, I run a... anti-servalance technology company. And so, do you worry? Do you worry about the U.S. government? I mean, here, I think the way that the panel was posed blockchain versus the surveillance state, most people are not thinking of the U.S., but what is your take on that?

It's one of the reasons why we based our company in the U.S. is in order to not be scared of the U.S. government because I believe that despite the criticisms, is one of the places that actually upholds the idea in the Constitution of freedom expression and privacy. So we have certain extremes of politics happening there right now. But like I said, unlike my home country, which has no Bill of Rights, so we don't even know what Guantanamo Bay is in the UK because people just disappear. So, you know, there's a strong differentiation there, and I think that, you know,

we need to encode more of these ideas into code, as you've been saying, not just law. so that we can enforce them in different ways. But I think that I'm less scared about the U.S. government and I am about other governments. I think one really big trend for the future that we should aspire towards is one where we can move from a world where we don't really have a choice, a good choice profile. Right now we either use Facebook and all these other applications,

that have these massive drawbacks, you know, or we don't. And I think through a lot of these decentralizing technologies, through competition, we can get to a world where we can choose exactly the software that we want to use, and this results in all of these other derivative benefits. We can be very conscious about how our data is used. we can be very conscious about the exact features of the applications. You know, you're talking about the Cambridge Analytica situation, and, you know, I gave a talk last year, March of last year, about Cambridge Analytica

at a time when everyone was like, what are you talking about? That sounds crazy. But, you know, it's been something that we've kind of, has been flying under the radar for a while. I think in the Cambridge Analytica situation specifically, I would attribute the, you know, perhaps the biggest risk there due to the fact that there was a monoculture in terms of the software that we use.

There was one single social network with billions of people that had a single algorithm that was governing the feeds of these billions of people, and it was something that was able to be exploited. Whenever you have rules, those rules are going to be exploited by those who are the most sophisticated. And if, however, we had a decentralized social network

with many different clients and many different pieces of software, the extent of that wouldn't have been able to happen. And you would have had different developers and different teams making different decisions. So I think we need to move to a world like that as opposed to a world where a blight could spread across all of the crops in a country

and just devastate the population. The same thing can't happen in the digital world. Okay, so we've literally got one minute left for this panel. And I just want to frame this question because at the beginning of the Internet, everybody thought that, oh, here we have this technology, it'll enable people to communicate peer to peer. And instead now we've got, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Google, all managing our communication.

So as we move forward into this world of blockchain and crypto tech, crypto assets developing, what do you hope is kind of the key design principle, I guess you could say that the different projects used to ensure that we don't end up in the same situation where 20 years down the line we have the crypto version of Cambridge Analytica or WeChat. I'd say that it's actually, it's kind of incumbent upon the entrepreneurs and the investors to think about how to build a decentralized set of companies. So often people ask me, what's the Facebook of blockchain? And I'm like, you're asking the wrong question. So we actually have the capability to build an ecosystem of lots of companies, none of which is trying to take over the other one, but actually wants to cooperate and, you know, have innovation happening in different places.

And I think that's a much more vibrant ecosystem, and I believe that's part of the mission of people who are in this industry. So the core principle is decentralization. Exactly. Okay. Comparable. Okay. Collaboration. Collaboration.

Collaboration. I think if we can build systems or the outcome is that we're all doing well, that is collaboration, right? When you have a zero-sum game the way we have in our finance today, and so the way we have in our corporations, any other companies, success is a threat to you, right? This is why Facebook buys WhatsApp, buys Instagram. Anything that is doing well, you need to either own or crush or copy. In the blockchain industry, at least so far, we have a very different kind of ethos, and the technology also lends itself to a very different manifestation because of open source, because of forking. You can take anything you see, copy, paste it, make a change, and if people want to run with you, they can. And so

everything we know about IP, about patents, about, you know, private property, personal property in the realm of corporate products is changing. And I'll just give a quick example, Bankor and Tezos as well, we are foundations. We are not-for-profit foundations that minted currencies, collected currency, and now are growing our ecosystems. The mandate on our foundation is, foundations is not profit. It's not to make a profit. It's not to charge the users. I get asked all the time, oh, do you take a fee on every transaction? No, absolutely not. It's a not-for-profit foundation. It doesn't exist to create profit. That said, if it grows, and if the network is adopted, and if people use it, the value of this currency increases. So there still is profit

to be made and profit centers to be built on the infrastructure and in the ecosystem, but profit is not the mandate of the foundation, it's adoption and growth. Okay. We have 10 seconds. To be a pessimism, I think this is really, really hard, and we don't, and no one today knows exactly how to do this really well because it's fairly new. The main difficulty is that centralization is generally more efficient, and there's a tendency in society to push towards the middle of the distribution towards efficiency in the common

case at the cost of having very high cost failure in the tails. And it's really, really hard to push against that trend. Once you have something that works, you'll have centralized version of it and they work slightly better. And so unless the people using it actually directly, explicitly care about decentralization, it can make it very, very difficult. It doesn't mean it's not worth trying. One of the things we're doing in Tesos, for instance, is that instead of having this model where, well, you know, there's a network that, you know, there's a network that people are using and then there's like a development team that works on the network that curates it and do all these tasks. One of the ambition of Tesos is to have self-governance,

which means that the people who are participating in a network and using it are directly making the decisions that impacts the future of the network. And so I think the way that you make people care about decentralization is you have to appeal to something others than just efficiency. You have to appeal to something a little more like, a little bit like a sense of belonging, a sense of community, I think that's possibly the key that is going to make people care about decentralization. They'll use this because they're part of this community, as opposed to a corporation, for example, or a centralized product

that don't give them the same sense of belonging. Okay, I think that's a great point to wrap up on. It's not just in the hands of the designers, but also the users you can choose to use kind of like a graphite rather than Google Docs or whatever. So, you know, be thinking about decentralization. One last note is that if you are interested in these topics that we discussed, I discuss them a lot more in depth on my two podcasts.

One is called Unchained, and the other is called Unconfirmed. You should definitely check them out. And otherwise, thank you so much to our wonderful panelists. Thank you.